I accuse Bryan Caplan of hypocrisy on the “Lorelai paradox”

A while back Bryan Caplan wrote The Lorelai Paradox and Parenthood as the Trump of All Past Regret. His argument is that because parents love their children as unique individuals and would not want to replace them with any other child, they cannot regret any event that resulted in said children turning out just the way they are. It always struck me as a poor argument, but I didn’t realize until a few days ago that Caplan himself had explained why. Here is what he said about Independence Day: “How about conservatives? They’re likely to say “This war created our country – of course it was worth it!” But without the war, conservatives would still have a country to get misty-eyed over – it would just be Britain instead of America. If you’re going to love whatever country you’re born in, it’s hard to see the point of fighting to make a new one.” Equivalently, Caplan would love his children even if they were different from how they are now, and if they had birth defects I am confident that he would prefer that they had been born without them. Caplan treats the situation differently because he is not a conservative. In case you are wondering, I think is Caplan is right about independence but not children.

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4 Responses to “I accuse Bryan Caplan of hypocrisy on the “Lorelai paradox””

Of course, Caplan’s Panglossian argument is silly at any level. If you meet your “soul mate” you can just as easily anoint that occasion to trump all past regret, since any prior physical perturbation might have steered you on a different path. Notwithstanding the fact that there surely might have been other perfect loves (or beloved children) to be found (or created) on countless counterfacual plains of possibility, one real-world question I would ask is this: what if, prior to the imputed regret-abolishing event, you had done something really horrible? Like if you murdered a child prostitute while traveling abroad? Does your newly kindled affection for whatever seemingly perfect and beloved attainment render regret over such an event moot as well? Does Caplan even consider the implications of his view? I’m still looking forward to his pronatalist polemic, but my expectations aren’t high.

In certain respects, Caplan reminds me of Naomi Wolf, who seems similarly inclined to elevate commonplace (and replaceable) personal experiences to a place of public revelation. There’s a lack of introspection in this habit that’s hard to overlook.

…Caplan is inconsistent in declaring the “insane” to be rational while in another paper saying the opposite of poor criminals.

This is consistent with libertarianism making tortured arguments to defend itself without resorting to the propertarian heart of the ideology.

Criminals of a property rights violating sort cannot be defended in libertarianism, so instead of blaming structural inequality a libertarian resorts to a variation on high time preference and poor character. But merely being insane – or non-property rights violatingly “criminal” – is consistent with libertarianism, so a defense of the mentally disturbed as merely reflecting a different lifestyle choice is put forth.